COMMENTS: 5

You’d lose a fortune betting against human ingenuity. While I enjoyed to perspective of the physicist, pricing factors lead to radical shifts in technology that render many of our current projections of earth, and its future, completely obsolete. A few hundred years? Not just based on consumption. A far, far, far more likely disruption in human existence is nuclear war, a plague, massive volcano eruptions, or a meteor hitting earth.

Are you intending to imply that this physicists musing on inherent physical limitations to economic growth are a cute amusing diversion to economists, who can be tolerant of their ill-informed physicist friends? He seems to make a number of reasonable points, certainly worth discussion. “Economist Humor?”

Physicists, engineers, and other hard science people will continue to find resources and develop the economy.

Economists will worry about how humans cooperate for the betterment (or detriment) of humanity given those available resources.

We could overpopulate and die off once we reach the limits of our resources in boom and bust cycles, as we have done repeatedly in the past. Or we could find a way to reach an equilibrium in which we don’t need boom and bust cycles. Other than expansion into space in the distant future, those are the only real options.

It would be interesting if someone would come up with a quality of life index which we could graph alongside the energy use and economic growth indices. I would guess that it is not increasing at anything like 2-3% annually, and might even be flat or declining.